When the Dead Come Knocking
by southerngirl89
Summary: Michonne's life changed dramatically when humanity started losing the battle with the walkers. Will she be able to hold on to her humanity, too? Michonne-centric. Other characters will be introduced. Rating will change later for language/sexual content.
1. Crazies

A/N: Is it October yet? I'm ready to kick off the new season of TWD! This is Michonne-centric. Other characters will come into play as it goes on. The rating will probably change later for language and sexual content. Reviews make me happy, and if you read this, thank you!

Disclaimer: I do not own anything concerned with/relating to The Walking Dead. Owning Daryl would be nice, though!

* * *

**Chapter 1: Crazies**

Michonne stood silently under the tall Georgia pines, listening to the wind whisper through the trees, waiting for the crickets to start chirping. The sun, already disappearing below the horizon, took the warm light out of the woods. The breeze carried a slight chill with it instead of the usual humid breath it drew across her skin. Goosebumps prickled on her dark skin. Fall was fast approaching. Just the night before, mosquitoes had hummed loudly, like tiny helicopters, around her ears. Tonight, there were none to be heard. There were only the sounds of the wind and a few timid chirps of crickets beginning to sing night songs. The cricket-sounds were comforting to her. The tiny chirps were non-threatening; they also served as an early warning system. When the crickets stopped making noise, she stopped moving. Something else, someone else, would be too close, and she would want to see them before they (whatever _they_ turned out to be) saw her.

She didn't move with such caution in the day, but she couldn't afford not to at night. Deciding that her earlier false alarm was unwarranted, but still feeling slightly uneasy, she began to move on. She lightly touched her katana, still in its sheath, and jerked the chain in her hands. The katana soothed her, and jerking the chain brought her captive party ambling behind her.

Although, technically, a captive party was usually alive.

The two zombies with iron clasps around their necks hissed and growled as they both came shuffling behind her, responding to their chain-tug. Their rotten, lifeless eyes sometimes rolled in one direction and then stayed in that position for a while. The connective tissue behind the eyes had badly decayed, and Michonne was surprised the eyeballs of the zombies even still sat in their sockets. In fact, one eyeball of one of her captives had already fallen out and had hung loosely, flopping about the dead thing's face for nearly a week before Michonne couldn't handle the flopping eye and had quickly severed the connective tissue with one quick swipe of her katana.

She had seen things that had hardened her and made her less likely to cringe since the world went to shit, but she still needed to remind herself of who she used to be sometimes. The flopping eyeball, swinging back and forth, had reminded her of her old self. The old self that would have cringed, covering her eyes, if she had once seen it in a movie. But this was no movie now. This was real life. And this new life had changed her into someone new - someone more capable of coping with this new world.

A new world where friends and family died... then reanimated right in front of you.

Tried to kill you.

Tried to tear your flesh from your body.

Tried to make you become a groaning, lifeless, human-eater, too.

* * *

In her old life, Michonne had been a lawyer. She had seen things in black and white. Right or wrong. The law not only governed her career, her cases, but it also helped to make up part of who she was. There was no room for that same law in this world - the old laws no longer applied. Black and white were thrown out of the window. A world where the walking dead wanted to eat you? That definitely constituted as a gray area.

She had been funny in her old life. Talkative. Engaging. She tended to see the glass half-full, and she loved her life. College had been a breeze, and her career was only getting better. The only misstep that ever made her stumble had been the divorce from her husband. She had always heard that strong career-oriented women couldn't have a family like everyone else. And her marriage to her husband had proven everyone wrong.

They had lived the good life for a while. She was the primary breadwinner of her middle-class family, and her husband hadn't seemed to mind. She had two beautiful daughters with him, and one of her daughters was finally old enough to study fencing - just as Michonne herself had done as a child. The quiet, suburban household suited Michonne, her husband, and her two daughters.

Little did she know that her husband _wasn't _as carefree as he presented himself to be.

He suddenly asked for a divorce one day, out of the blue. Michonne was blindsided. Irreconcilable differences. That was the box he had checked on the divorce papers. He didn't want to make a scene - he just wanted out quickly and quietly to keep the girls from being caught in the middle of a messy divorce. He told her that he didn't love her anymore.

Michonne knew better. She was an intelligent woman - she had instincts. She knew he was threatened by her career, by her success. If he was truly a strong man, he wouldn't have minded that she was successful. But, like all weak men, her success plagued him. Made him jealous. Bitter. Unhappy, apparently. So Michonne had given him his out, not wanting to fight. She had done everything right. He had been the coward.

But she had already decided she wasn't going to badmouth him in front of her children. She wasn't going to be that bitter ex-wife. She was going to take the high road and focus on working hard for her babies. She wasn't even thinking about another relationship when she met Mike.

Mike had been good for her. Good for her girls.

She had never known that her new start with Mike would also coincide with the new, ongoing downfall of humanity.

* * *

Strange things had been appearing on the news for weeks. Deaths. Mass killings. The government kept everything hush-hush, and everyone had started turning to the internet for information. But there were so many things floating around online, Michonne had no idea what was fact and what was fiction. The realistic, analytic side of her kept telling herself that she was just being paranoid. _Something _was going on, sure, but she had no way of knowing if or when it would affect her. It was something that was going on somewhere else. Not in her area. Not in her life.

And soon, the government blacked out all social media and all news networks.

Then the world literally fell apart.

Michonne had been caught off guard one day while shopping with her girls. A frantic voice had come on over the Public Announcement System while she and her girls were eating in the food court of the local mall:

_"DO NOT PANIC. THE MALL IS TEMPORARILY BEING LOCKED DOWN FOR PATRON SAFETY. STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS AND EXITS. PLEASE STAY CALM."_

Both of her daughters had looked across the table at their mother, a mixture of fear and confusion reading on their small faces. Michonne had reassured them, but internally she was frightened and confused, too.

About that time, a crowd of screaming, frantic people came clambering from the opposite end of the mall.

She knew she and her girls had to move or else they would be trapped or trampled, so she snatched both of them up by their arms and instructed them to run with her. But the crowd of panicked people surged forward too strong, and she watched one of her girls slip from her fingers and be trampled to death right in front of her.

Michonne didn't have time then to mourn or try to scramble through the stampede to collect her poor daughter's broken body, so she clamped on to her youngest daughter and jumped up to hold on to the railing of the food court's higher level. This position didn't elevate them much, but it gave Michonne a chance to get her youngest daughter out of the way. The little girl screamed and cried for her sister, and Michonne had huge tears dripping down her face. She didn't realize she was crying. She couldn't think, couldn't register a thought, because she was glued to what was unfolding in front of her.

Like a terrible car crash, she couldn't look away. Surely she wasn't seeing people tearing hunks of flesh from other people with their teeth. There was no way she could be watching people bite others, then lunge upon the fallen and rip into their bodies. Smacking, snarling. All the while the victim was still screaming. No, she couldn't be seeing that. She was making it up in her head because she couldn't cope with seeing her oldest daughter trampled to death. That had to be the explanation. But she still felt herself pull her youngest daughter against her to shield her eyes from the sights Michonne hoped she was imagining.

Her daughter then screamed bloody murder, clutching at Michonne, and started trying to jump down from the raised ledge.

One of the crazed people had bitten into her daughter's neck, and the little girl bled out in her arms.

* * *

Crazed people. That was what Michonne had kept repeating in her brain as she had found a way out of the ruckus of the mall. She was numb inside - not wanting to believe both of her daughters had just died in front of her. They had been shopping. A girls' day. That was it. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and now they were dead. She couldn't bear it.

A bad batch of drugs or a terrorist attack, biological warfare gone wrong, had certainly been the culprit behind the crazed people who had killed her girls. That had to be it. She had no way of knowing, then, what it really was.

The crazies who spotted her on her way home followed her there, and she was running full speed. She had always been athletic. She loved playing sports and watching football with her boyfriend, but she never dreamed she'd be using her athleticism to outrun a crazed hoarde of cannibals.

When she made it home, she found her front door wide open, but she had no choice but to run in and shut the door behind her. The hoarde was coming.

Michonne watched through the peephole at the advancing throng of crazies, trying to catch her breath, when she heard shuffling behind her. She had turned around to discover her boyfriend Mike and his best friend Terry ambling towards her, arms outstretched, teeth gnashing.

They were gnashing their teeth at her.

They wanted to rip her flesh open and eat her innards just as she had seen happen in the mall.

She felt trapped in a real-time nightmare.

* * *

All of those life-shattering, soul-changing events felt like they had happened in another life. It might as well have been. The life she lead now was only for her survival. She had no comforts, no luxuries. She didn't have to wake up her girls for school or get herself ready for work now.

She had to survive.

Sighing, not wanting to think of her little girls or her life before, she pulled the chain which held the two zombies harder so she could pick up her pace.

The two zombies had once been Mike and Terry. She knew they were none of their former selves now, but she still talked to them sometimes. She had lopped off their arms and lower jaws with the katana she had found during a supply run, and she used them as protection. The cannibal-monsters sometimes overlooked her if she pulled the two rotting corpses closer to her.

Protection.

That was what she told herself she used them for, but she wasn't completely sure if she was being honest with herself.

They were also the only semblance of her old life, her old self, that she still had. The only reminders. And perhaps she held on to them because she didn't want to become crazy and cannibalistic like they had. And maybe talking to them - even though they would never answer her, didn't know her anymore, only wanted to eat her - kept her from losing her humanity.

In this new world, she had found there wasn't much humanity to spare.


	2. Bullet in the Chamber

A/N: Thanks to the guest reviewer. I'm definitely going to continue! I hope to keep it interesting. I'm using elements from both the comics and the show (but more from the show). Hope this update is good... I feel like I'm making it too slow-paced, but I like to build on backgrounds and the story. Hope you guys enjoy.

* * *

**Chapter 2: Bullet in the Chamber  
**

Leaving the comforts of her suburban lifestyle had been a hard adjustment at first. Michonne hadn't realized how connected she had been to technology. To comforts like air conditioning. Heat. Running water. And for her to go from all that to a basic nomadic lifestyle – moving from place to place, searching for food and water and shelter, staying away from humans instead of seeking them out – she couldn't believe how far she had come. Or how far she had gone to the bottom, depending how one chose to look at it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was still that glass half-full person.

For about a week, she had been sneaking around the woods somewhere in rural Georgia. She didn't know how far she was from Atlanta, but she knew the further she was from the city, the better off she'd be. When she had left, she knew the city would be overrun by the zombies. The grotesque things would be like cattle trapped in a chute with nowhere to go except out. They would rip and tear their way through the last remaining humans, and then there would be nothing left for them to kill.

She didn't think the zombies were smart. They couldn't think. Couldn't calculate. But they were like animals – driven by instinct to eat. And a hungry animal always found a way to survive. She just wanted to survive, too.

Two nights ago, she had discovered she was on the outer edge of a farm house. She didn't try to wander out across the open field. During the months since the outbreak, or whatever had happened, she knew a safe territory was invaluable. People who had a stronghold in a safe place would defend it with their lives. And she could see lights on in several rooms of the farm house, which meant they had a generator and more than a couple of people living there. She definitely didn't want to tangle with them since she was outnumbered. She may be skillful with her katana, but if the people had guns, she would lose every time. Hand-to-hand combat was no match for a high-powered rifle or even a small hand-gun.

Michonne had been sure to steer clear of the place during the day, and she had stayed close to a small stream - not the farm house - since she had wandered into the area. She couldn't risk being spotted, especially in an unfamiliar part of the woods. Now, hiding in the treeline directly across the field from the farm house, she used the cover of darkness as her protection. The night air was chilly, with a more pronounced cold than in previous nights. Southern summers were hot and humid - the air literally felt as if it were sweating. And when cold snaps came, the southern humidity allowed for the cold to seep into a person's bones. She shivered, thinking of the cold she would soon have to endure, and turned to check on her two dead hostages. Her two captives were tethered to a tree trunk, and she had them tightly binded around it so they wouldn't rattle the chains as they sometimes did. She couldn't wander far from them, though.

Just before dusk, she had seen a man coming out of the woods and heading toward the farm house. From the way he moved, she could tell he was just as stealthy as she was, and he carried a crossbow. A string of half a dozen squirrels was thrown carelessly over his shoulder. Men like him were beyond dangerous. She definitely didn't want him to find her.

She had taught herself a little about tracking, but she was still a novice. She used her stealth and athleticism to her advantage, and she was always cautious. Watching. Making sure to be in tune with her surroundings. But the man with the crossbow and the squirrels on a string, she bet he knew how to hunt. How to track. And that made him a predator. There were enough predators lurking in the woods now without human instincts. A human predator was the most dangerous thing of all.

She was broken out of her reverie about the man in the woods when she heard leaves rustling and a low growl behind her. She jumped up from her squatting position and unsheathed her katana. She always acted first and asked questions later. Her chained captives grew uneasy, trying to thrash around against the tree, but the two zombies were not _truly _straining at their restraints. This meant she was dealing with another walker, not another human.

Piece of cake.

She stood completely still and silent, waiting for the dead thing to come out of the darkness and into the reach of her razor-sharp katana blade. Her tethered zombies moved more sluggishly now, almost in a bored manner. She wondered if the cold would have any affect at all on the muscles and bones of the zombies. Probably not. They were already dead.

While Michonne thought, she saw the figure lurch out of the darkness toward her. It snarled at her, smelling her scent, and began to shuffle faster in her direction. With her face pulled into a grimace, she wielded the katana high above her head and then spun, throwing her blade arm out straight as she pirouetted in the darkness. Over the months, she had become deadly accurate. She could cut the head off a zombie with precision without hardly being able to see it - just as she was doing now.

With satisfaction, she felt the blade slice through the dead thing's rotten skin, muscles, and tendons. She always swung with enough force to send the head flying away from the body, sometimes seeing the vertebra of the spine sticking up from the headless torso, and sometimes seeing the rotten brain stem of the dead thing cascading through the air. The rotten, black blood in the body of the zombie had made her vomit the first few times she had whacked away at the neck of the thing - not knowing how to handle her new weapon - but now the smell hardly bothered her. And her weapon was now a part of her.

The head hit the ground with a thud, and she heard it roll across the leaves. She kicked the flailing body to the ground and went in search of the head. Everything was in shadow now, and the moon was bright in the sky, but the leaves of the trees above and a low-hanging mist shielded most of her vision. To her left, she heard the teeth still chomping, gnashing together in the skull, and she drove the end of her blade into the head. The gnashing of teeth stopped. With a quick flick of her wrist, she slung the dark, sludge-like blood from her blade and placed the katana back in its sheath.

Then she listened. Besides the night sounds of the woods and her two zombie captives shuffling against the tree trunk, she heard nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing else was coming - it had only been one lone walker. Satisfied, she wrapped her cloak tightly around her. She had made it from a large piece of burlap she had found in a shed beside an old grain silo. She had fashioned it big enough where she could throw it over her head if need be. And she would definitely need it now with the cold coming.

Then she heard something, and she froze. The echoes of an argument were drifting through the woods, sounding like two men. She knew taking down the biter hadn't made that much noise, so they couldn't possibly know she was there, could they? She wanted to unchain her two zombies and get the hell out of dodge, but she couldn't risk trying to escape and being caught. Instead, she moved cautiously to the edge of the trees, straining her eyes and ears toward the sound of the argument.

In the distance, she could see two men standing face to face with one another, in a heated discussion. Keeping herself well hidden in the shadows and behind a tree, she tried to strain her ears to hear what they were saying. The words wouldn't drift her way, though. But the scene folding out in front of her is why, even though she desperately missed people at times, she didn't try to fraternize with them. In this new world, it was kill or be killed.

And then a gunshot rang out.

Startled, she made herself peer out from behind the tree. She could now see a body laying on the ground, and one of the arguing men stood, along with a little boy, surveying the scene. There must be more people than she thought at the farm house if there were children there and wandering about at night. She didn't know what had happened, why one of the arguing men had to die, but she knew she better get away from the farm house if she wanted to stay safe since they had guns and were willing to use them. The gunshot had proven that.

Michonne had no way of knowing, then, what else the gunshot meant in regard to her safety.


	3. Savior

**Chapter 3: Savior  
**

The gunshot had startled Michonne more than she realized. Since she had fled from Atlanta, she had seen other humans (they hadn't seen her), but she hadn't seen real violence like that since her day in the mall in Atlanta. The blade of her katana had sliced through more walkers than she cared to count, sure, but she hadn't seen any human deaths since that fateful day in the Atlanta mall.

She stood frozen, listening to the screams of all the frantic people echoing in her mind. Heard the horrible squelching noise of throats and stomachs being torn open by teeth. Watched blood gush from ragged wounds and drip down the chins of the monstrous grotesque things. Looked on, unable to do nothing as her daughter was crushed beneath the feet of a fearful crowd. As she watched the light, the life, drain from her other daughter's eyes right there in her arms.

She had to get away.

People meant danger.

People meant walker food.

Quickly, she strode silently to the tree trunk and began un-tethering her two dead hostages. The taller one leaned toward her, and even though it no longer had a jaw, she could hear wet clicking noises in the open mouth cavity of the dead thing. She knew it would have been chomping its teeth at her, trying to sink them into her skin, if it had any. Still reeling from her thoughts about Atlanta, she punched the walker square in the nose. The punch didn't do any good on any practical level, but it made her feel better. The bone of the nose made a satisfying crunch, already brittle and rotten, and its head rocked back against the tree trunk.

"Nasty bastard," she mumbled, wiping her knuckles on her already dirt-caked pants.

After she had unwound them from the tree, she pulled the chain taut and close to her. She wanted to put miles between herself and the farm house, and she didn't need the party of two, deader than dead, to slow her down.

Michonne had been walking quite a while when she realized all of the night noises had stopped. Only the sound of her feet (and the four zombie feet) rustled through the leaves. Pausing, the zombies almost knocked into her, but thankfully they stopped. They always shuffled around in a restless manner, swaying back and forth on decaying legs, when she stopped short like this, so she had learned how to tune their noise out. She grew quite angry with herself, standing there and straining her ears, because she didn't know when the woods fell silent. Her damned Atlanta thoughts had thrown her.

She then heard a branch snap somewhere above her head and thudded beside her in the dead leaves, and her katana flew from her sheath in a split second as she looked up into the darkness. She saw nothing. No shadows stood out against any of the other shadows.

But she was hearing something in the distance. Coming closer. She couldn't quite make out the sound, but it sounded like whispers.

No, not whispers.

Something shuffling through leaves.

Lots of shuffling through leaves.

Then, she began to hear a series of low groans.

Her eyes raked the darkness in front of her - every muscle in her body tensed and taut with tension. Ready to spring into action.

And then, she benefited from a break in the cloud cover and was given sliver of moonlight to work with.

She almost wished she still couldn't see. Silhouetted against the darkness, she saw zombies lurching in her direction. Not one, two, or even five, but a whole herd of them.

Her fears about the walkers finding a way out of the city had come true.

She ran.

* * *

The chain to which her two zombie hostages were attached clanked relentlessly as she tore through the darkness. Michonne couldn't care at that point. A hoard of god knows how many walkers was now breaking up the silence and serenity of the woods, and she had to try to move far enough away where she didn't have to face them head on. She could handle herself if she stayed out of the middle of them - but there were so many headed in her direction. They would overtake her if she wasn't careful.

"Shit," she mumbled to herself again, while tearing through the woods, thinking of her predicament.

The zombie chain was pulled taut as she dragged her two captives behind her. At least the sky was beginning to signal that dawn was approaching. The horizon was a hazy blue beneath an inky black - light fighting to overtake the darkness. Michonne wished harder for daylight to come quickly more than she had in a long time.

She ran on, feeling her legs grow more and more tired and achy. A stitch had started to pull at her left side. She wasn't training in cardio anymore, and she could definitely feel it. But she figured even the best cardio training couldn't have prepared her to outrun an army of dead humans.

The area of woods she was now in was not level in elevation. There were small hills and low dips in the landscape - most of it being because she was on an embankment that was close to the highway. She decided to stop and rest for a moment. With the highway to her left, lower than where she was standing, she would be able to see zombies coming from that direction. There were no bushes or any low foliage to impede her view through the trees, so she would be able to see pretty well in any other direction.

She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees, and made a point to breathe in through her nose and exhale through her mouth. It would slow her pulse and relax her breathing, and she hoped it would help remove the stitch in her side. Running for so long had worn her out. She barely had any provisions left - needed to make a supply run - but how was she supposed to do that now with a hoard of zombies hot on her trail?

As she caught her breath, she heard the quick rustle of leaves, like footfalls. Someone else was running, too.

Michonne snatched the chain that held her two captives and moved behind two trees, waiting for whoever was crashing through the layer of dead leaves to pass. Kill or be killed. Every man for himself.

Three zombies, most likely coming up the embankment from the road, hurried toward the sound of the mystery person. Michonne tightened her grip on both her katana and the chain in her hands in case she had to make a move. But the three zombies didn't seem aware of her presence - just the other person's.

A blonde woman, looking disheveled and just as harried and worn as Michonne had felt just a few moments before, came crashing through the woods about 20 yards away from Michonne. The blonde looked as if she wanted to rest, too, but then she noticed the three zombies in front of her.

Michonne studied her from behind the trees. The woman was only wielding a small knife, and she didn't seem to have any other weapons on her. The blonde managed to kill two of the zombies with just the small knife, and Michonne couldn't help but feeling a little impressed as she watched the woman dispatch them.

But the woman looked visibly exhausted, and as she swung her knife at the third zombie, she lost her footing and went down in front of the ghastly killer. The woman crawled backwards, trying desperately to get away from the grotesque dead thing, making sounds of pure terror.

Maybe it was the panicked sound in the woman's cries, or the hateful way the zombie advanced toward the woman that made Michonne break her vow of 'every man for himself.' Maybe it was because, on that day, for whatever reason, she had thought more about her daughters than she had in a while, and the pain of losing them was still fresh in her mind. Perhaps the fact that she was still dragging around two reanimated corpses - one who had been her boyfriend, one being her boyfriend's best friend - made her realize that she couldn't just watch someone be turned into the same thing right in front of her.

She hadn't been able to help her daughters that day in the mall.

She hadn't been able to help Mike or Terry.

She had only helped herself.

Guilt.

That's what she felt.

Michonne didn't think. She just acted as she propelled herself forward, throwing her burlap hood over her head, and jerking her two captives along behind her. With a quick swipe of her katana, she cleanly cut the zombie's head from its neck and peered down at the blonde woman. The blonde woman looked up at Michonne with a mixture of fear, gratitude, and confusion on her face. She hadn't known Michonne had been anywhere near, and the zombie-kill had taken her by surprise.

Michonne just peered down at the blonde from underneath the shadow of her hood. She wasn't quite sure why she had saved the woman, but even so, she didn't want to reveal herself just yet. She still might have to kill her.


	4. Caught

A/N: Thanks for the encouraging reviews! I apologize for the delay... life gets in the way sometimes. I'm definitely gonna continue with Michonne and all her badassery. Hope you enjoy.

* * *

**Chapter 4: Caught  
**

The blonde woman, looking bewildered and a bit terrified, caught her breath and looked up at Michonne's hooded face.

"Who the hell are you?" she asked.

Michonne's dead captives began straining at their chains at the new voice. Michonne couldn't positively identify what the dead things were more attracted to: sound or smell. Or both. Perhaps the two zombies had grown accustomed to her scent, and now that they had picked up on new prey, they tried desperately to get to it.

To sink their teeth into the blonde woman's flesh.

If they had jaws, of course.

"Get up," Michonne growled, allowing her katana to catch a ray of sunlight.

She was sure that the other woman had noticed her weapon, but she wanted to remind her that it was still unsheathed and ready for use if need be.

The woman reluctantly pushed herself up from where she had almost met her demise in the fallen forest leaves, brushing her palms against her pants. She studied Michonne with a guarded look on her face, then she nodded to the two zombies behind Michonne, who were still trying to fight against their chains.

"What's the deal with-"

"Look, we can play twenty questions later. More of these damn walkers will swarm this place after hearing you," Michonne sighed impatiently, interrupting the woman, while jerking at her two captives, "we're upwind, too. You can come with me or you can go your own way, but I'm not staying here."

She figured she had earned herself enough good karma for one day by saving this woman. Not that karma necessarily mattered in this world anymore. After all the things she had seen happen since the world went to shit, she couldn't be sure of any old beliefs that she once harbored.

But that wasn't the time to be questioning her existence. She was still in existence, at least, but there were more pressing issues - like the fact that the living dead wanted to eat her.

"I was with a group of people, but we were separated when the walkers overtook our farm house..." the woman said before trailing off.

Michonne had never seen this woman at the farm house during her watches, but then, she had tried to avoid the farm house as much as possible. She noticed the woman sounded hesitant about what to do. If she had spent most of her time with these people, then of course they were the ones she wanted to seek out. But Michonne had only depended on herself and her two modified walkers - she didn't care about those people who had left the blonde woman behind.

Not even acknowledging the other woman, Michonne began heading in the opposite direction of the road that she knew was down the other side of the hilly embankment. A small creek ran through the area, and she wanted to follow it. She would fare better against the walkers if she had the water to one side of her.

The two rotting, yet still shambling, corpses barely budged when Michonne started walking. They strained at the chains, still wanting to investigate the newest prey they sensed on the scene. Even without jaws or arms and hands, the instinct to kill and eat still remained. This is why Michonne still felt somewhat creeped out when she decapitated the walkers - the bodiless dead thing still chomping like a piranha was one of the things she still had trouble keeping out of her dreams at night.

She had forcefully snatched the chain that held her two prisoners, continuing with her creek-side plan. After walking only about twenty yards, she noticed that there were more than just the footsteps of the two zombies behind her. Barely turning her head, just cutting her eyes, she caught the blonde woman following her in her peripheral vision. The woman was studying the two chained zombies with a look of gruesome curiosity on her face.

"Either walk in front of me or beside me," Michonne commanded.

She had hoped the woman really would go on her own way and look for the people she had been separated from. Now she saw that she was stuck with this woman for a little while, and she wanted to internally kick herself for saving the blonde. She didn't want to deal with having to watch out for herself and another person. Not that the woman wasn't capable of protecting herself - she was trying her damnedest to do so with her knife - but she was only armed with a knife, after all. And she didn't know anything about the other woman. Michonne liked to move quickly and quietly. Get in and get out. Never stay in one place for too long. And this woman had been living on a farm with who knows how many people.

No, Michonne didn't like the fact that the woman had decided to tag along at all.

"What difference does it make? Don't like people walking behind you or something?" The blonde asked sarcastically.

But she had heeded Michonne's order and fell into step beside her.

"Told you - we're upwind," Michonne snapped impatiently.

Was the woman dense?

The blonde's eyebrows raised in understanding.

"Oh, so the walkers, they're blocking our scents?" she asked, turning to look at the zombies again as they walked.

Michonne had to kick behind herself every once in a while now to hit one of the dead things in the shins so they would back off. The new scent of the blonde woman still enticed them.

"For the most part."

Michonne felt the blonde's eyes on her again, studying her now as they walked. She could sense that the woman wanted to ask her questions, but Michonne didn't show any interest. She had no reason to get to know this woman, and she didn't owe the woman any explanations. Didn't owe her anything at all. But what she didn't want to admit to herself was that it felt nice to have a living being beside her - even if she didn't really want the other person there.

They walked in silence, and she was grateful for that.

Her social skills had taken a definite toll since the world went to shit. In the beginning, she had still talked to her two dead captives as if they were still Mike and Terry. She had talked to herself. Snippets of old songs would come into her head, and she had hummed and sang. But then, over time, she had realized it was safer to be quiet. Saner, too, perhaps. Coming to an end at the mouth and hands of a zombie was terrible enough, but if she did go out that way, she wanted to still have her wits about her. She didn't want loneliness to make her become a shell of herself - someone who talked to plants and trees and even the dead right before they ripped her to shreds. So she succumbed to silence and began paying more attention to taking in sounds rather than putting sounds out.

Her own voice still surprised her sometimes.

"I'm Andrea, by the way."

The woman's voice - Andrea, apparently - ripped Michonne away from her reverie. 'Ah, here we go,' Michonne thought. She had already made up her mind that she didn't want to get to know this woman, and yet the woman wasn't going to make that easy.

Michonne just nodded.

She felt the woman's eyes on her still, but they kept walking in silence. The chained zombies had begun to give up their attempts at eating the new woman, so Michonne relaxed her grip on the chain and let herself get a little further ahead of them. This Andrea woman seemed to be no threat, so Michonne also slid her katana back into its sheath.

A matter of seconds was all it would take to unsheath it and sink it into the skin above the other woman's collarbone or below her ribcage anyway.

"Thanks for saving me," Andrea offered, attempting at conversation with Michonne again, "I can usually handle my own against these bastards, but I was exhausted. And all I have is this knife."

Andrea held up the small switchblade. Michonne's eyes did cut over to the small knife, all the while her grip tightened on her katana handle - just in case the woman tried anything funny. The only thing the woman could use against Michonne was the element of surprise, and if this Andrea decided she wanted the katana enough, she may use the element of surprise to steal it. Michonne always kept up her guard.

Studying the switchblade, she nodded again. Impressive. Even people armed with larger hunting knives sometimes fell victim to the walkers. Obviously, Andrea could hold her own.

"Interesting weapon you got there," Andrea said.

Michonne tightened her grip on it even more.

"Did you train in martial arts or something before everyone started dying and coming back to life?"

"Found it," Michonne said, while pushing her burlap hood away from her face.

Now Andrea really studied Michonne's features.

"Not much of a talker, are you?"

A small smile played on Michonne's lips in spite of herself. She turned to look at Andrea, and then noticed something through the trees over Andrea's head.

A building.

"What?" Andrea had snapped around in the direction that Michonne's eyes were looking, and she saw the building, too.

While they had walked, Michonne had noticed that the ground had become a little flatter, and where they stood now, they were almost on even ground. Through the trees, and across from what appeared to be a dirt road, sat a small building that appeared to be a bait and tackle shop - a country store. Georgia's backwoods equivalent of a mom and pop grocery store, a sporting goods store, and - to an extent - a clothing store all wrapped into one.

The old treated lumber on the outside of the store would have looked friendly, homey even, back before the dead got up and walked, but now it looked a bit sinister. The two small windows were both knocked out, and an outside screen door hung haphazardly from its hinges, the screen ripped and torn. The doorway was just a dark, gaping entrance.

Both women and the two zombies had paused, and Michonne and Andrea stood looking at the store.

"I want to check it for supplies," Michonne said decisively, heading toward the store with caution.

"Wait. Wait!" Andrea hissed, reluctantly following, "how do we know it's safe?"

They had reached the edge of the trees at the road at this point, and Michonne ignored Andrea as she tethered her dead hostages against a tree.

Andrea looked at Michonne incredulously.

"Hello? Inside could be crawling with walkers..."

"Stay here with them," Michonne answered. "That knife is no match for walkers in there."

"What if - hey...!" Andrea hissed again behind Michonne, but Michonne had already set out across the dirt road to the storefront.

She hurried across the open space, and then quickly and quietly moved onto the front porch of the store, pressing herself against the wall next to one of the small windows. She stood absolutely still, allowing the adrenaline to course through her, so she would be able to quiet everything else except what may or may not be noises inside the store. Usually if she waited long enough, she could tell if there were shambling feet inside a building. This was always her mode of operation before entering a new place.

Across the road, she saw that Andrea had moved to stand behind one of the larger trees, and she appeared to be watching in all directions around her. At least she knew she stay silent and somewhat out of sight.

Michonne couldn't hear anything inside the store, as far as she could tell, so with her katana in hand, she moved into the darkness and pressed herself against the wall inside. Nothing moved. Nothing rushed at her. No growls or snarls came at her from the darkness. There seemed to be nothing inside the store with her.

She allowed herself to relax a little, and looked around as her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the building. Weak sunlight filtered in, and she saw that most of the shelves were empty and overturned. Random items littered the floor. She spotted cans of skoal and mangled looking packs of chewing gum on the floor at first glance. The wall behind the counter still held packs of cigarettes that may never be smoked, though there weren't many left.

Moving quietly into the interior of the store, a sickly sweet smell of something putrid, rotting, hit her in the face. She realized it was coming from a bait locker where crickets and worms, used for fishing, used to be stored. Potatoes were usually used as cricket food, and she instantly recognized the smell of rotting potatoes. The crickets had long been dead.

Above the bait locker, she saw that fishing line was coiled in sections on the wall. She decided to grab a bundle or two of the line. She also noticed some small rope, and she picked that up as well. Pulling the small string backpack from her shoulders to place her items in, she instantly noticed movement outside the window. Dropping the bag to the floor, she gripped her katana tight and moved into her fighter's stance. Whatever was outside was going to have to come to her.

"Okay in there?" Andrea's whisper carried through the darkness.

Michonne internally cursed, wanting to go outside and punch Andrea in the face, just as she had done to her own zombie earlier. What the hell was she doing?

"Clear in here," Michonne whispered angrily, "either come in or go back across the road."

Andrea came in.

"Sorry... I just... you never gave a signal," Andrea said hesitantly while looking around. "I think we're clear outside. Are you finding anything?"

Michonne just picked her bag back up, pointing to the wall of fishing gear, and she began collecting items.

"It reeks in here. Cricket food?" Andrea said, not whispering now, but keeping her voice low. "Reminds me of when we let the potatoes go bad when my dad used to take us fishing. It always-"

Andrea froze and stopped talking, and Michonne knew why.

They had both heard the wood flooring of the porch creak, as if someone had stepped onto it. Michonne felt all of her muscles tense, and she squeezed the handle of her katana so hard that her hand ached.

At that moment, the sound of boots taking large steps filled the silence, and a figure stepped into the doorway.

"Well, well, well, ladies. You two sure are a sight for sore eyes."


End file.
